November 15, 2004

Friday Loss Puts Pressure on Red

By | November 15, 2004

The pressure of the Ivy title seemed to get to the volleyball team (16-8, 10-4 Ivy), as the Red started the weekend against the Yale Bulldogs (14-7, 9-4 Ivy) looking off-balance and a shadow of the team that has risen to the top of the ranks this season. The Bulldogs stuck it to the Red, picking up a sweep win, taking the games 30-25, 30-17, and 30-23.

“Yale played well,” head coach Deitre Collins said after the loss. “I really did not think we would have played like this.”

The Bulldogs came out strong, led by the outstanding setting of Jacqueline Becker, who finished with 51 assists in the three games played. Becker was consistently deceptive, and the Red struggled to catch on to her play early.

“They’ve got a phenomenal setter that really gets you off balance,” Collins explained.

Despite struggling for most of the match, the Red seemed to hold its own in Game 1, leading, 11-10, early on. However, in addition to their overall strong play, the Bulldogs demonstrated during several points in the match that they just had more heart than the Red on Friday. For instance, while down 11-10 early in Game 1, Yale’s Shannon Farrell dove into her own bench to successfully save a partially blocked ball off of a Cornell spike. The Bulldogs would end the day with an incredible 76 digs, with their defense appearing impenetrable at times.

Cornell looked the worst in the second game, in which the Bulldogs mounted a tremendous 21-9 lead before a Red rally allowed the team to finish respectably with a 30-17 loss, its worst single-game loss in the conference this season.

In the final game of the match, Cornell came around with too little, too late, as the Red battled back from an early 12-6 deficit after a timeout by Collins to actually take a solid 19-16 lead. This tremendous 13-4 run brought the 1000 person+ crowd right back into the game. However, Yale took a timeout itself and established a quick response with a 14-4 run to silence the crowd and garner the game and the match.

Fortunately, unbeknownst to Collins and Cornell at that point, Harvard had also just dropped a 3-1 decision to Princeton on Friday, leaving the fight for the Ivy title still up in the air. Both squads won their respective ensuing Saturday matches to tie for at least a one-quarter share of the Ivy title.

However, the loss to Yale was a bad one for Cornell, as the Red already struggled against the Bulldogs earlier this season, dropping a 3-2 nailbiter to the Elis several weeks ago in New Haven. As the Ivy playoffs approach, Cornell will have to try to get back up to speed and rebound from this second loss to arguably the best team in the conference.

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ByNovember 16, 2004

Ron Artest is tired. The Indiana Pacer, former defensive player of the year, and now, hip-hop producer/ rapper is worn out — because he’s been working hard on an upcoming album. He wants “go platinum.” So he asked for a month off. Now, the one thing that really stands out to me, amidst this whole debacle, is that Artest was quoted as saying he doesn’t know the meaning of “integrity.” As in, the actual definition of the word. To quote the St. John’s dropout himself — “I don’t even know what that means…I need you to get me a dictionary.” Hey, I don’t want to insult the guy. But he makes you appreciate Cornell athletes. Cornell athletes compete in sports, excel in school, and I guarantee you that they know the meaning of integrity. But what does integrity really mean? You can forget the dictionary. Your fellow Cornell student-athletes know what integrity is all about. “To me, integrity is the ability to stand up for what you believe in even if it’s unpopular or against the norm,” said junior cross country runner Bruce Hyde. “I think it’s easy for successful athletes to lose sight of where they came from, and shift their moral and ethical values.” Hyde just won the individual title at the NCAA Northeast regionals. Clearly, Hyde — an amateur, a student, and someone who treks up Libe Slope just like you — can handle his work without a month off. Junior diver Kristin Rayhack was last year’s Ivy League champion on the 3-meter board — not to mention diver of the meet at the conference finals, and Cornell’s diving MVP. But she also knows that a person’s achievements in life are measured by more than just high scores and athletic honors. “To me, integrity means being honest and true to yourself and others without compromising your values,” she said. “Because I’m a firm believer in karma, I think acting with integrity is key to living without regrets, deservedly achieving success, and creating genuine and lasting relationships.” Deservedly achieving success. In many ways, that’s the essence of the Ivy League athlete. Consider junior wrestler Dustin Manotti. He’s the nation’s second-ranked grappler at 149 pounds. He was an All-American last year, and he placed fourth at the 2004 NCAA championships. Next week, he will compete at the Marines All-Star Classic, one of nation’s premier events. His strength is enviable to many — but so is his demeanor. “Integrity to me is being respectful, having self-control, and maintaining discipline throughout life,” he said. “Especially when dealing with certain situations such as a sporting event.” After all, sports are not just about raw athletic ability. Countless great athletes never live up their potential because they lack Manotti’s resolve and self-control. The same discipline that gets a student through prelim week, can also get an athlete through to the NCAA finals. Cornell athletes have spent much of their lives dedicated to their sport. So when Manotti wins an event, we shouldn’t just consider that one victory. We should think about the countless practices and endless lifting that brought him to that achievement. When Rayhack executes a flawless dive, we shouldn’t think of her accomplishment as just one graceful moment. We should think about her years spent working at her chosen sport — a sport where victory comes by the smallest of margins. And when Hyde crosses the finish line after a cross country race, we should realize that he is not simply finishing a race of a few miles. He is finishing a much longer race, going back to the very first time he laced up a pair of running sneakers. And now look at Artest. He’s a great athlete, no question. Yet his self-obsessed, undisciplined behavior — not to mention horrible rapping — prevents him from achieving even more. Artest is not alone among professional athletes in this department. Maybe these experienced pros need to learn a little of what amateur Cornellians seem to already understand. Archived article by Ted Nyman

ByNovember 16, 2004

In a current exhibit in the Johnson Museum, photographer Jane Alden Stevens delivers contradicting images of pain and peace, physical rest and emotional unrest, death and persistence. The collection displays remnants of World War I: the monuments, the graves, and the devastated landscape. For Stevens, the project was about collecting images that represented “the impulse for undertaking acts of remembrance to lost loved ones.” The initial focus was to collect human constructions of grief and re-visualize the physical abstraction of the recollection of war. She places the memorials we have built for our lost soldiers under the critical, detached and static observation of the camera lens, evoking momentarily forgotten loss, stirring up unrest. There are the formal, nationalistic and uniform expressions: the monuments and cemeteries. And then there are the personal: the mementos, the letters, poems, flowers, and wreaths. Stevens’s memorial of the war is not a mere bookkeeping of the now faceless young soldiers; more so, the collection organizes what is left behind and after. There is a desire to give coherence to the human experience of loss. Stevens’s photographs however, resist intellectual lucidity despite the flat, depthless medium. Her image of Menin Gate, the British Memorial to the Missing in Belgium, looms awe-inspiringly above the viewer. The lines cut sharply into the sky; the names etched on the walls are barely recognizable, lost on the surface of the edifice like the soldiers’ lives that have been embedded into a mass historical narrative. The photographs place emphasis on the manner in which people mourn. Spatially dominant in Stevens’s photographs are tokens (letters, poems, and photographs) left behind by mourners. As a result, we see images both of distance and intimacy. There is a respectful and elegant detachment in the photography yet an inescapable involvement. Viewers are kept at a safe distance from the uniform, institutional interment of the lost and at the same time, they are reminded of their own loss, that the anonymous, random juxtaposition of letters on the memorials are one’s own family. Stevens relies only on ambient light. The photographs display little contrast; there are only hazy shades of gray. The visible grains of the photographs have their own dynamics, each stirring and positioning itself into objects of stark immobility and solidification: statues, monuments, and tombstones. The results are images that express the same ambiguity and perplexity of its content. The images, like the war memorials they represent and the viewers that witness, have not quite settled. All the images are evacuated of human life but not of spirit. They have an elegiac respectability yet palpable sensation. It is cold and clammy. The soil is wet. The air is frigid. And as one is inclined to find another warm body when chill creeps in, so do the disturbed visitors of the exhibit. Lingering among the sharp, monumental lines and bare branches of trees is not the spirit of the lost soldiers but rather one’s own conscience. In lieu of a guestbook, the exhibit provides small note cards upon which visitors may express their own memorial. The cards, left on a molding below the photographs — alongside others written from previous exhibitions — proves to be an exhibition of its own. Despite the concentrated subject matter of this particular exhibit on the European memory of the first world war, people wrote to and on behalf of their grandfathers and uncles from different wars, reassuring them of their immortality. Some seek peace; others bestow it. And then there are those that seek answers: why it happened, why is it happening, and how we can let it happen. There are a few that call to mind the recent election and its anticipated consequences. Stevens initially intended to “explore the persistence of human memory.” But the collection and, accordingly, its exhibition evoke not only the pain of history but also present-day anxieties. As the bare landscapes of Stevens’s photographs are haunted by the loss of World War I, today’s war haunts the museum space. Jane Alden Stevens’s Tears of Stone: WWI Remembered will run through January 2, 2005 in the Johnson Museum. Archived article by Whine Del RosarioSun Staff Writer